Featured Writer: Keven Doyle

Deliberates

The rumbling of the first train woke me, as it had every night for the last three weeks.

Cursing, I staggered out of bed, then stumbled over to the hallway. Already awake, I figured I might as well get a glass of water.

The kitchen, which lay at the back of the small house I'd just leased, looked out over a half-acre of scrub land. Of that, only the last few feet that jutted up against my house was fenced in. The rest of the acreage, as far as I could tell, belonged to the railroad.

Having nothing better to do, and with my sleep already shot for the next few hours, I stood at the window and watched the line of cars roar past. As I did nearly every night, I counted my blessings that my new house didn't sit next to a crossing, with all the requisite bells and whistles. Even so, the jouncing, rushing roar of the cars, along with the shrieking of wheels rushing over old, rusted rails, had jolted me awake every night since I moved in.

The damned things even ran on Sundays.

My fault, I figured, for not checking things out before I moved in. I knew, from the last few weeks' experience, that three more would come after the first one, each spaced about forty-five minutes apart. Since the whole uproar would start again in less than an hour, I didn't see much use in going back to bed.

The cars continued rushing past my window, the dull roar mingling with a tear-generating shriek of metal on rusted metal.

As the last few cars sped past, the moon popped out from behind a cover of clouds and shone down on the tangled expanse between my house and the tracks.

In the new light I noticed my next-door neighbor standing against his back fence and decided, what the hell, I needed some way to fill the time.

I'd seen the old boy once or twice before. He owned the house to the east of mine, a house with about the same size yard as mine. As I stepped outside I shut the back door forcefully enough that he'd know someone was coming.

He really was an old boy, and the few times I'd spotted him coming or going, he looked to be somewhere around eighty. I'm not exactly youthful myself, but I'm several decades away from that guy.

And here I'd always thought insomnia would go away as you got older. I'd often pictured myself sleeping through anything in my golden years.

Guess not.

"Evening," I called out as I came up to my fence. The old duffer stood in the corner of his yard next to mine, his arms propped up on the cross section of fence as he stared off at the receding train. When I spoke, he looked my way briefly then turned back to stare at the diminishing train.

With no answer, I walked up and leaned against my corner of the fence, using the same posture he did. Finally, the oldster looked over at me. I couldn't tell for sure, even in the moonlight, but it looked like he had tears in his eyes.

"Hello there," he said. His voice, dry and cracked, reminded me of the croaking of an elderly, dried-out mummy.

"Not a bad evening," I said as casually as I could.

"No, it's not. Nice weather this time of year."

If anyone had been around to see us, it would have looked odd for two men to stand in their yards late at night, discussing the weather. But I needed to do something to pass the time until the next train.

"I wish the rental people had warned me about these damned trains when I took the place," I began. "If they had, I would have thought twice about signing the papers."

"Not me," the old codger said. "I like the sound. Keeps things peaceful."

"Really?" I asked. "Then why are you out here so late."

"Because I like the sound." He looked at me for the first time. "It brings back memories."

Uh oh, I thought, realizing I'd come close to putting my foot in it big time. "What kind of memories?"

"Lots of kinds." He turned away from me and looked back at the now-empty rails. "I worked on lines like these for a good part of my life. Started out barely fifteen and worked my way up."

I looked around, casting about for a convenient excuse to go back inside.

Even tossing restlessly in bed seemed preferable to standing out here listening to the old man ramble on about the olden days. At the same time, I'd just moved in and didn't want to appear rude. Maybe a good solid yawn would do the trick.

"Worked in the cars all the way up till I was fifty."

I stopped the yawn before it got out and looked closer at the old fellow.

"So what'd you do after you quit the railroads?" I asked, curious despite myself.

"Didn't do nothing," he replied. "Just took the disability and hung it up."

"Really?" I peered closer at him. Clouds were beginning to skip over the moon again, but you could still see fairly well. I'd noticed the old guy a few times walking around, working in his garden and pushing a wheelbarrow filled with dirt. He hadn't struck me as the disabled type.

"Did you get hurt in a wreck?" I asked out of typically morbid curiosity.

"A wreck, yeah. Not sure if you'd say I'm the one got hurt."

"Huh?"

"Get this straight, son. In a freight train wreck, the folks in the train never, but never, are the ones hurt."

Despite the lateness of the hour, I found myself perking up a bit. I started to say something back, but he kept on talking.

"You ever traveled by train?"

Not wanting to break the flow of his narrative, I just shook my head.

"It's the kind of weight -- no, mass -- no, sheer goddamned power -- that most people can't even imagine. When you get that mother going, especially with loaded cars, ain't nothing going to stop it. When the speed's up, that mother jumper just ain't going to stop until it wants to.

"Bad thing is, there's always all kinds of things trying to make it stop, none of 'em with any kind of chance. Some, of course, just dumb brutes that don't know no better."

"You mean like dogs or something, running along the tracks?"

"Hell, dogs are usually the least of a lineman's worries. You get up in the mountains, up away from anything normal, and all sorts of things come creepin' out on those tracks. Coyotes, mountain lions, even bears more often than not."

"Bears?"

"Oh, yeah. All the time."

"Funny," I said. "I would've thought most animals would be scared off by the sound of the engines and stuff."

The oldster turned again, and for the first time I saw the faint hint of a grin. "You would think so, at that," he chuckled. "And most of them are, but when these engines go over miles and miles of woodland, there's always a fair number of the beasts that, for some reason we could never figure out, either don't move or try to hop the tracks."

"And lose?"

" 'Course. I told you kid, ain't nothing can stop those monsters when they get to going."

We shut up for a while. We just stood and looked at the empty track.

During the middle of our silence, sounds started coming from the scrub land. Insects and possibly some burrowing animals. Temporarily stilled by the first train, the field started to come alive again.

"Hard to tell sometimes," the old man said.

"How's that?"

"Sometimes, if you're in one of the back cabs after you've hit something, you can see it off the side of the track. But it's usually hard to tell what you hit."

"How come?"

The oldster chuckled faintly and looked back at the rail line. "You still don't get it, sonny. You take twenty or thirty cars, or even more, and hitch them up together. Even if they're running empty for some reason, you're still talking thousands of tons of metal and iron. If they're loaded up, forget it, You can't even guess the weight. So you take all that tonnage, crank it up to forty, fifty miles an hour . . ."

He stopped for a moment, and I felt compelled to keep him talking. "Yeah?"

"So you take all that weight, crank it up and send it down the rail.

Anything stupid enough to get in the way, you're lucky sometimes to even know about it, let alone identify what it was."

I had a flashing image of crushed and crumpled animal corpses strewn across the countryside.

"That happen often?"

The old man chuckled again, and this time the sound kind of creeped me out. "Oftener than most people, even railroad people, realize. Like I say, anything of even normal size, the guys in the lead car may not even look down in time to see it. Something's got to be awful bulky and heavy for you to even know you've hit it."

"But don't other people see the bodies?"

"Not usually. If you're in any kind of woods at all, other critters come along and cart them off."

"Oh." Just then, we heard the first faint sounds of the second train approaching. The second one always came in the opposite direction of the first, and the first had passed us almost exactly forty-five minutes ago.

I must have been really tired because the second sounded even louder and more massive than the first. The old guy and I stood there as it trundled past, and I imagined I could actually feel the ground tremble as the cars swept down the line.

After it passed, my ears rang and I felt a bit out of breath.

"That one sounded louder than the first," I managed to get out.

"Loaded," my neighbor said.

"Huh?"

"Filled up, loaded with cargo. So it's heavier and causes more of a vibration than when empty."

"Oh." It sounded so obvious when he said it. "I heard something on the news awhile back about trains. Something about the state wanting to put up extra lights at crossings. There was an accident or something."

"Won't do no good," he shot back. "Too many goddamned fools think they can outrun a train."

"Really?"

"Sure." He turned back to me. He seemed to have a friendly enough face, even though slight traces of sadness kept dancing back and forth in his eyes.

"You see, there's always folks trying to beat trains at the crossings.

They're driving along in their little two or three ton cars, or maybe even one of those big SUV's, and they don't see any reason why they should have to wait an entire ten or fifteen minutes while the coaches pass. So as soon as those lights go on and the crossing bars start to come down, they gun the gas and try to get under it. Sometimes they make it, sometimes they don't."

A slight breeze gusted over us as I thought about what the old man had just said. Something in the last sentence or two sounded different, and I had a hunch where he was going.

"You've seen that happen?" I asked. "When they make it?"

"Lots of times, more than you could imagine. Lots of people out there walking around that don't have the foggiest how close they come to being wiped away."

"That bad?"

"Sure," he paused long enough to work his cheeks a bit and spit a wad of phlegm out into the darkness beyond his fence. "See, what most folks don't get is how come the trains don't stop when they see a car crossing the tracks. What most don't understand is that there's no way in hell a train can stop. You can't have that much tonnage, that much speed, that much sheer mass and expect it all to come screeching to a stop in anything under a couple of football fields, if that."

"Funny," I chimed in. "I remember reading Superman comics when I was a kid. He used to just jump down on the tracks, stick out his hands, and the train would come to a solid rest."

As we'd talked, the sound of the third train of the night had come upon us. Approaching from the same direction as the first, it grew louder and louder as the bright beam of the forward lights, or whatever the hell engineers called them, flicked back and forth across the field. As the light grew brighter, we could see the dim outlines of who knew how many cars.

By mutual consent, the old man and I shut up and watched the line of cars rush past. I lost track of how many there were, but it must have taken at least twenty minutes until the last one appeared and started heading past us.

A few minutes later, the noise had gone and the field came alive again.

Only one more to go for the night.

"Hell, sonny. He did the same thing back in comics when I was a kid." It took me a few seconds to catch on that my neighbor had taken up the conversation right where we'd left it. "Now let me tell you what would really happen. If old Supes was tough enough and mean enough, yeah, he could stop that train. But it would push him backwards at least several hundred yards, and over all that yardage the rails would be snapping and bending and flying off to the side at godawful speeds, and the cloud of smoke rising up from the friction would probably suffocate anyone within a mile or two."

I chuckled at his description even as I saw the entirely serious look on his face. "So when someone tries to jump the tracks and beat the lights . . ."

"Most of them have no idea how massive that sucker coming towards them is.

Hell, I've known engineers who spotted cars on tracks from three football fields away and still couldn't stop their engines on time. And you'd be amazed how little time it takes a load of cars to cross that distance.

"They look really slow as they trundle along. But those boys are moving so goddamned fast it doesn't really register. And even slowed down there ain't no way for them to stop until they're ready to."

"Even for a big vehicle like an Explorer or a . . ."

"For nothing," he interrupted with grim finality.

The clouds moved again and once more, in the light from the full moon, I could see his face clearly. It shocked me how sad, how gut-wrenchingly tragic, his eyes looked. And dim as I felt, I began to get a glimmer of why.

"You know all about that, huh?" I asked.

"Sure do."

"First hand?"

For a few minutes I didn't think he would answer. Then he nodded his head. "First hand."

"Oh, hell," I said as the light dawned.

"Must have been rough," I said, wincing instantly at how lame I sounded.

"Was," he admitted in a much softer voice than he'd used so far. "Still is some nights, especially when it's raining. It was raining that night. Can you beat that? Damn fool not only tries to beat my engine, he tries it at night in the rain."

My sudden understanding depressed me, and I didn't want to stand out there talking anymore. I'd started to say good night when he spoke up.

" 'Course, the hardest part to believe is that there's some things even worse."

He glanced over at me, shook his head, and went on.

"The animals are bad, but they're common enough and brainless enough that you get used to it after a while. And the track jumpers, well, they just give you the cold sweats to even think about. But the worst -- the goddamndest worst-- are the deliberates."

My tiredness, combined with the old boy's moroseness, really had me dreaming of bed. But he kept throwing out those little tidbits that kept me hanging by the fence.

"Deliberates?" I queried.

"Yeah." He looked straight at me, and I saw something in his eyes I hadn't noticed yet. "Those who lay down on the tracks and wait for you to come."

How could I respond to that? What could anyone say that would even begin to make sense out of such a statement? I considered, briefly, that the old boy was pulling my leg. But he'd been so serious for so long that I couldn't bring myself to believe that.

"That can't be," I said. "It's too terrible."

"How old are you fella?" he asked.

"Huh? I'm forty-three."

"And in all your time you've never noticed that terrible things sometimes happen?"

"You mean people actually commit suicide by laying down on train tracks?"

"Sure. Some. Not as many as take pills or use a gun. But I can absolutely vouch that it happens."

The moon danced back behind the clouds, once again darkening his face. I felt glad that I couldn't see that sad, sad expression.

"Why?" I asked. "Why would someone do that?"

He sighed and turned away from me to look out again over the wild acreage between our yards and the line. "Don't really know," he said. "Maybe it's easier to sit and wait for it than to actively go after it. With trains, unlike rope, guns or anything else, you don't really have to do anything.

Just lay there, turn your head the other way, and wait it out."

"I'll bet," I said in a half whisper, "that would be the kind of thing to give a guy nightmares."

"It sure would," he whispered. "Comes back to you again and again. And I couldn't stop it. No matter how much I tried and prayed, by the time I saw him lying across the tracks, nothing on earth could have stopped that train in time."

Off in the distance, I caught the first faint hint of the roar from the last train of the night.

"What happened afterwards?" I asked. "Did they every figure out why he did it?"

"Son," he said, his voice so low I had to bend over the fence to hear, "you still ain't listening. When that mammoth runs over something as tiny as a person, there just ain't nothing left to look at."

I'd just about had enough. Much as I wanted to stay and comfort the old timer (how tired must he have been at that time of the night), I couldn't physically take it anymore.

"Take care of yourself," I told him. "I'm going back inside."

"Still another engine coming. Should keep you awake a bit yet."

"Don't think so," I replied. "Probably fall asleep as soon as I hit. I'll talk to you later."

"Okay."

As I turned to walk away, something made me look back. The old fella still leaned against the fence, almost slumped over it, and in the moonlight I thought (but wasn't sure) that I saw tears running down his face.

"If it's like you said," I told him, "you couldn't have done anything."

"I know," he croaked. "Been telling myself that for years now. It just don't help."

Yawning and just about out on my feet, with the sound of the last train now clearly audible, I looked back one last time at that lone, defeated figure slumped in the corner of his yard.

Not knowing what else to say, I went inside.

I never saw him again, and I don't think anyone else did either. A few days later, I noticed a couple of cop cars parked outside for a bit, along with a few strangers who may or may not have been relatives.

I could have told them when I'd last seen the old boy. I could have told them that, despite my fatigue, I hadn't gone straight asleep when I climbed into bed. I could have told them, even though they wouldn't have cared, that the fourth and final train of the night zoomed by at its normal frantic speed, never slowing a bit. Not even as it passed our houses.

I could have told them that the old boy couldn't have weighed over a hundred and fifty pounds, and I could have relayed to them what he said about how hard it is to see something so small lying on train tracks.

I could have told them all that, but what of it? My neighbor himself had explained to me, and he should know, that at those speeds, weights and distances, even if they'd believed me and gone to look, they wouldn't have found anything.

The trains still rumble by in the night. Only now they keep me even more awake than they did before. Every now and then, when it's really bad, I go stand by my back fence and watch them go by.

I think of my old neighbor.

I never knew his name, had never spoken to him before that night. Of course, I'll never know why he did what he did on that particular night, instead of any of the other countless nights that he stood outside and watched the engines go by. I just hope, really hope, that he'd planned it before he and I started talking about the trains.

But I'll never know.

Keven Doyle is an English teacher and part-time writer from the American Midwest. Most of Kevin's short fiction falls in the horror or dark fantasy genres. However, this piece, while it does have some dark aspects, is a bit more realistic than the majority of his work. His material has appeared in a number of journals including "The Edge, Tales of Suspense;" "The Nocturnal Lyric" and peridotbooks.com. He also has new stories pending publication in "Outer Darkness" and "The Edge." A native of Kansas, he's spent several years teaching English and communications at a couple of community colleges in Kansas, and this year has taken on a new position teaching high school English in central Missouri. The idea for this particular story came to me a few years ago when I lived close to a railroad track. I enjoyed listening to the trains going up and down the tracks all night. For me, it was a nice, soothing sound. But I got to thinking once about how other people might react to the sounds of trains constantly moving outside their house. Out of this line of thought came "Deliberates."

Email: Keven Doyle

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